Author: Lars Iyer

We’re going to die in prison.

We’re not. Don’t be so self-important.

What’s so important about us that they would want to lock us up? Do you think we’ll be some kind of threat?

We’re not a threat. We’re easily managed, easily contained. We’re not devious criminal masterminds. We’re not key strategists in the resistance.

We’re educators. We shape young minds.

Do we fuck. The students don’t listen to us.

They have us programmed. We’ve been figured out. Our kind. Because we are a kind. There are loads of people like us. They’re, like, experts on our kind. And they know exactly how to play us. They, like, understand our incentives. Our drivers. They know how to press our buttons. We’re predictable. We run on rails. And they built the fucking rails.

The book is dead – discuss. We’re dead – discuss. The university’s dead – discuss.

In point of fact … Death is dead. Nothing’s allowed to finally die. Everything just persists in death. Until the end. Except there is no end.

 

I need to cut all the positive people from my life. There’s too much positivity. I’m sick of optimism. I want to know more melancholic people. More depressed ones. I want to know people who are attuned to the essential sadness of the world.

You really only know people you share a temperament with.

 

I think we need some malevolence. I think it would bring out the best in us.

We should advertise. Wanted: maniac.

 

We’re on the same team.

What team is that?

Team Nihilism. Team Gnosticism. Team Gnosis. Team Revelation of Nothingness.

 

All these K-pop stars killing themselves. It's amazing. It's bothersome. Why are K-pop stars killing themselves, all of a sudden?

A poised drunkenness. The perfect balance of drunkenness. A lucid drunkenness, like lucid dreaming. Which we can steer where we want. Which we can direct. Orientate in the right direction.

 

Lubricated.

 

All this drinking is preparatory. We’re preparing a way out.

 

Happy drunks. Everyone drinking, and involved each other’s drinking. Everyone up. Everyone happy. And supportive of each other’s drinking. Nurturing each other’s drinking.

 

Drink is the question. Drink is the answer. Both at once.

 

Drink is the answer, probably. Or is it the question?

Stop being so clever. I despise clever.

Organisation management is a front. Organisation management is run by MI6 or something. Or DARPA. Where did it come from, so suddenly? Where did it spring up from? Suspicious, isn’t it, the rise of organisation management? The way it’s swallowing up the older disciplines.

 

All the last free outposts of thought, captured. All the subject areas of the humanities being taken over, one by one.

They have a thirst for disaster, our students. They’re tireless. It’s helped them make sense of what’s been happening. Of their lives, plagued with disaster.

They want to understand themselves, in the midst of it all. What they might be able to do. How they might be able to live.

Escape! we always tell them. Leave this benighted country! This doomed continent!

It’s too late for us, we say. We’re too set in our ways. We’re too old! But you’re young. Get out there! Go! Before it’s too late. Before they ban travelling, or whatever. Before they shut down the world. Become unknown, unknowable. Flee.

Find somewhere to take your last stand. Set up a homestead. Arm yourself. Keep chickens. Grow stuff. Store stuff. See if you can sit the catastrophe out.

Costa Rica! we tell them. Head there! There’s no 5G! No electromagnetic pollution!

 

The students before us.

Personal problems – no doubt they have those. Personal crises – God knows this world is difficult enough! It’s a war on the young – we all know that. They want to destroy the young – psychologically. And by every other means.

We’re here to reverse the damage. To restore to life. To lead all the way back to the Ursprung. To give them back their youth …

Soon, the students will be back. Soon, they’ll push open our lavender doors. Tread our lilac-on-red-wine carpets. Their voices with fill the lilac corridors.

Students! Our life! Our chance! Our future! Who make us conduits! Rivers! Who make us seem to flow with knowledge!

Student-innocents, who’ve come from everywhere, from all over the country. God knows, they’ve even come from overseas!

Hope! They bring hope! And let them bring an Indian summer when they arrive for the autumn term! Let them bring an unseasonably warm and summery September!

 

What must they think when, as we teach, in the middle of our lectures, we go off on some mournful tangent, when we lament the state of things to come …. When we let slip the word, omnicide …. Or the word diabolism …. When we simply look at them mournfully, as if to say, If only you knew what we know … If only you could see …

Didn’t Cicero insist that the divine fire – lightning – reveals itself as love. As the love of the neighbour?

Cicero didn’t seem very loving to me.

Hate is a mode of love, she always insisted. Hate evil, love good, right?

How does she get from like lightning to love? It’s confusing.

 

There’s a … messianic energy that is at work … a way of bringing the lightning to the ground and putting it to work. That's what she used to say. Letting it become effective. 

As what?

As love.

 

It’s not about destroying the world, destroying reality, but shaking it out of its contentment, its automatism: that’s what Cicero used to say. Out of its closed, mechanistic system.

 

You have to use apocalyptic energy – that’s what Cicero thought. It wasn’t about the preservation of the created world, nor its destruction, but the redemption of the world – the transformation of creaturely reality.

We have to shape and transform reality. Can we do that? Aren’t we too impatient?

To use the negative energy of desire, of despair. To use it to transform the world. A kind of work – to transform the creaturely realm. Our realm. Is that what we are? Are we creatures?, we asked her, like idiots.

 

The mission – to liberate everything from the bondage of the world. From what we’re tied to. From the natural order.

 

Divine energy. Revelatory energy. The flash of revelation. The madness of anarchy and amorphy. The destruction of all forms.

 

Divine violence needs a mediator. And that’s what the philosophy dept was to be. Where the flame of love was to be mediated, shared out. Where it transformed from violence to love.

That was the mission of Cicero.

 

A messianism that would belong to us – not an imitation of God, not a destruction, but part of the process of redemption.

Not creation, not destruction, but modest work – the mending, fixing and repeating of the world, lifting it from the lower realms.

We work against the university, of course we do. We work against the purple – the imperial purple, the apocalyptic purple, whatever. We’re struggling against it. We need the struggle. It sharpens us. It focuses our minds. And the students’ minds, too.

The fact of the purple. The depth of the purple. Gives them something to work against. They have to go through hell to reach their paradise. So we have to show them they’re in hell. A purple hell, in this case.

 

What are the psychological effects of purple? Isn’t it deliberately depressing? Debilitating? Isn’t it supposed to keep us down. To keep us here on Earth?

Purple! Deep purple! When did they decide on it? How did they decide on it? Who did they consult? Was it just random? Was it just pick some random colour scheme?

Purple!? what’s their plan? Do they even have a plan? Isn’t it that part of the torture: wondering whether or not they have a plan?

Their plans? … what plans? … What if it’s just random moves, just whims, fancies … Arbitrary decisions, made on the spur of the movement.

Who knows, they might even mean well. Purple might be a gift to us – their idea of a gift.

 

And the views! What a panorama! Twenty feet of window in my office. There’s St Thomas’s. There’s the War Memorial. There’s the library. There’s a row of shops. There’s the green around St Thomas’s. There’s the whole sky, the magnificent sky, so vast.

The sky, and birds flying across. And clouds moving across. And sometimes blue. And sometimes the sun. And sometimes, a bright day. The sky! Elevation! A view! Isn’t that something: to have a view. To command a prospect.

Is that part of their plan? Part of their non-plan? It feels like pure beneficence. Pure luck. What bad intention could they have in giving us a view? In letting us see out of our prison?

The sky! The whole sky! What a gift to us! What plenty! We’re practically in the sky. We’re practically airborne. Flying through the sky, like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz. Flying to where, in our purple house? God knows!

 

The purple’s thinking. It’s having purple thoughts. And perhaps we are, too. Is it contagious, do you think?

Our students are the future … our hope … we’ll send them out into the world like shock troops. To spread the message. The doctrine.

They sense it in us. Our ardency, which has to become their ardency. Our fervour, which will become their fervour.

Our role: to transmit the lightning. It let it strike through us and reach them. We have to make them receptive. We have to open them to radical evil, and beyond that to radical good.

We’re shaping the future. Were forming true apocalypticists. Who can see through the fake apocalypses. Who don’t live in fear. Who won’t be overwhelmed in what is to come.

Adventure – I wanted an adventure. A philosophical adventure, it turns out. And I wanted some fun. Some sparring. Some to and fro. There’s no more to and fro between my husband and I. I wanted to be aroused. Isn’t that the thing?

 

Wouldn’t you rather that I was far, far away and that you could write to me? Or write about me, your love for me, if it is love.

Distance – that’s what you’d like. Then I could become a fantasy figure upon whom you could project whatever you like. I’m too close to you. I’m too real. I’m too here. That’s not what you want, is it?

 

The sky’s sealed against us. We can’t get through. We can’t get to the other side. What’s it like on the other side? Blue, I imagine. I’d like to see the blue. This has been the coldest, greyest Spring, hasn’t it?

 

What does it all mean, philosopher? What does anything mean?